...know you've seen a lot of demos and a lot of new shiny stuff, actually I have
the best job in the whole library 'cause I get to mess around with old books and
new technologies and that's what Turning the Pages is all about.
What we've done is we've taken a selection of books from our collection and now increasingly books from other collections as well. We have digitized them in such a way that you not only get to see the book for its contents but also get the feel of what it's like to handle a historic book.
What you see here is our dedicated kiosk, we have two of these at the library. But what I'm going to show you today is the web version and what we've done is we have a selection of books. We have Robert Hook's Micrographia whose kind of
the guest star today, we have Gessner's Historia's Animalion which is a 16th century collection of animals, Pare's 1585 Surgery Textbook his complete works, we have Vesalius' On the Fabric of the Human Body which is probably the most famous illustrated book in the history of medicine, and the Ketham's Fasiculo de Medicina which is the first printed illustrated medical book from the 1490's.
The book we did first was the Vesalius because what happened was the British Library who originated this technology came to us a few years ago and said you know we've got a good copy but you've got a better copy can we work together on this. And you can see Vesalius on their website as well but after that our people especially George Thoma and his team said we can do better. So what we've
done is a number of books since then and our most recent is The Hook.
Now when your at the library you actually have the option of using a touch screen and you bring your hand across the screen and the pages turn. We couldn't quite do that but we do have; this is not the world's fastest connection but you get the point.
Now there are a number of other features here first of all you have a foldout. Now the fun thing about this is that these are engravings; engravings are not run for the same printing press as the letter press would be so you have a number of these foldouts. And we had dealt with interesting big pictures before but not the foldout, so the development people decided the way to do it was to have the book kind of step back to have room for the foldout. And you have an explanatory text that goes with every page, written by an expert on Robert Hook, me.
And you also have, a little zoom if I actually let me open up the foldout again whoops. Zoomify is like a little magnifying glass that you can drag over the images to close in on them. For those of you who are more technologically interested these are TIF files and it takes 18 TIF to make the page turn smoothly. Big file, yes this lady in the front row pointed out. You can basically do about forty pages. After that, things just get way out of hand
in terms of what you're messing with.
Some of these pages are actually quite famous, this is a very slow connection. This is actually a picture of cork, and if I do this, and Hook was the first person to realize that plant and animal matter was organized in little enclosures which he called cells. It's the first time the word is used and it sticks. And it's particularly the cork bark which is very very orderly, cork was obviously designed by a cataloger, everything is nice and orderly little straight lines.
These are flint crystals, and of course flint is very important in the seventeenth century because it's a military item their using this for the flint locks on muskets and no one knew why flint sparked that way because no one had ever seen the shape of the crystals. These are bird feathers showing the barbs and a snowflake and if you think about that one for a second you realize
that Hook was outside in the snow looking at the flakes 'cause he had no way of keeping the cold in his laboratory.
Milkweed. These are fish scales and rosemary and then when we wrote this, when I wrote this, I decided we really had to have a little Shakespeare quote here, of course you can move this around. So we have a little Shakespeare quotation because Shakespeare Ophelia talks about Rosemary for remembrance, so we had to be literate so there it is. Oh yes, you can read the text very nicely,
oh well actually I was going to try something else, okay we have a sound system attached to this so when you're at home and you want to hear the track, can you hear it? Okay let me read it to you, okay Hook's boundless enthusiam often led
him in this book at least to make some odd combinations in illustrations such as his juxtaposition of seawood, and let's move this so you can see this better, this is seaweed and this is rosemary. So there's rosemary that's remembrance calls out the med Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet and there's pansies that's for thoughts.
People in Hook's time lived much closer to the physical world than we do and they were quick to ascribe special powers to herbs and plant, such as the rosemary shown here. Hook of course was far more interested in the structure of the leaves, when crushed gives off such a delightful scent and are so useful in cooking. And again if we didn't have everybody else in medical library world out there you could hear it. I'm sorry, linen linen.
These are nettles and you can see the little barbs on them. Now you must understand that this is 1665, microscope had been invented some years before but no one had ever published a book illustrated like this and Hook built the microscopes, ground the lenses, drew the pictures, supervised the printing,
wrote the text; he did it all.
These are poppy seeds, now of course to the naked eye they look like little smooth things, but Hook was able to show the complicated structure.
Fish scales; that's a very nasty looking bee sting and of course whenever there is a foldout this little icon over here comes live. Whoops, but only if you hit the icon. And again these are feathers, peacock feathers in fact.
And then the compound eyes of a fly. He's big into flies and bugs and fleas and such things in fact the most famous of the pictures is this one and again these are all nice big fat TIF files so you can really get kind of up close here. The other thing that the technology allows us to do is to put in additional information when we want it that may come from another source so here we have the picture of the microscope showing in addition to the design, okay the actual light path but it turns out that our friends across the street at the National Museum of Health and Medicine excuse me, have Hook's original microscope and they graciously gave us a picture of it. And by the way this is a big thing, think of like a two liter bottle of soda that's the approximate size of that scope.
Whenever we wanted to put in additional information we just had to put in one of these little hands and the hand brings out whatever additional slide we put in and whenever the little speaker is present there is an additional vocal track that reads it to you.
Now the fun thing about this, we've a lot of fun things, one thing amuses me is that you can kind of make up imaginary books this way since your only selecting forty pages, well with Hook that's about ten percent of the book. One that we did a bit earlier The Pare Complete Works from 1585 a much larger book both physically and in thickness is fourteen hundred pages created some other problems we had to deal with technologically, for example this binding which is really rather nice and is French and it is sixteenth century and your seeing gold tooling here is in fact not the binding from this book, the binding from this book was kind of boring so we took an earlier rendition that was the same physical size but would suggest a stiffer binding. Also with the Hook you’re actually seeing the pages that open next to each other, but with the Pare you’re not. What you’re seeing here these two books do not create one opening when you’re seeing the original… okay. And so what we ended up doing to make that a little bit less jarring is that the page numbers which were up here were digitally removed so that you don't have a page that opens and the pages you know don't match.
And if your French is good you can notice as you go through this over here it says that we're looking at the twelfth book, over here it says we're looking at the twenty-third book. And of course this page also has my absolutely favorite illustration since Pare was a military surgeon in the sixteenth century he was used to seeing people that had various body parts cut off by sword or whatever and these are in fact designs for prosthetic noses available with or without a mustache and obviously you can tell which one I got.
Now the fun thing about this technology is that there is no new software here.
This is all off the shelf software which we have put together in order to make this product work. We have more books in the process. We're going to have a sixteenth century alchemy textbook come up sometime later this year. But after that we have what's gonna be the coolest of them all: the Smith Surgical Papyrus which is up at the New York Academy of Medicine which is about 1750 BC and is the oldest known surgical textbook. Now the fun thing about this is that this has been at the academy for many, many years and long before the academy got it the scroll was cut into twenty three separate leaves, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art arranged to borrow this from the Academy and the Papyrus is on loan and will pretty much be under long term loan. But when the Academy took it out they had really nice high resolution TIF files made and then they loaned us the TIFs. And the easiest thing in the world is to digitally put them back together.
So in fact when the Smith Papyrus comes up later this year, it will scroll the way it has not scrolled in about two thousand years. The other nice thing is that given the size of the Papyrus, you'll have the entire thing with a brand new translation which was done by Yale University at the time the exhibit opens so you'll see the digital version that has not been seen forever and a nice shiny translation.
And I'm happy to say that the technology has gone even further than that, we were approached by the Folger Shakespeare Library for our advice. They wanted to do a Turning the Pages of their first folios. And with some work from us and some work with the Library of Congress they now have at the Folger Shakespeare Library what their calling Page by Page which is all the front matter and the complete text of Romeo and Juliet which works out to be about forty pages, we're back at that number again and you can leaf through and all sorts of hot links have been added so that you bring up explanatory text.
I don't know if the Folger isplanning on a web version, but all these things will be on the kiosks at NLM and also you know on our website under the History of Medicine edition webpage. So it's kind of fun.
I'm not sure quite what we're going to do after the Alchemy text and the Smith Papyrus. Obviously we don't need the physical book in our shop to work with it. We simply need good TIFs and someone who knows enough about the book to write something worth reading. We do not see this as a preservation technology, this is an access technology.
And it's a lot of fun ‘cause I actually teach a class at the University of Maryland's library school on the History of the Book and they have a whole lot of fun with this. Because I say okay look at this opening and what can you see about the text and what can you see about the book itself.
So can I answer any questions, yes ma'am. Yes, okay the question was is it explained on the webpage what we have done, yes it is. In fact let me go back a little bit here. If you go to the gallery of images it explains to you very specifically what page you were looking at, what was the original collation, all that other information. Though I gotta tell you about ninety-nine percent of the people that I've shown this to do not care, they just go oh cool. But it's the bibliographers and the gang that go like gee how come there no page numbers
and how come there's no catch words and how come the frontus piece you know so the information is there.
You know the History of Medicine Division is in PubMed too. But yes [audience member talking]. Well that's why I'm here. Yes ma'am. Have I been to the Gordon Museum in London? No. Well. There are alot of things that you can do, yeah. Yeah the idea of integrating this text with specimens or samples yeah, yeah. Well if you know the history of NLM at all, you know that we were once the Army Medical Library and Museum, and after the second World War we got, we got split. And that museum is now the National Museum of Health and Medicine over at Walter Reed. However if Walter Reed Hospital does close the plan is to build a new museum on the site of the National Naval Medical Center which means they'll be across the street from us, which tickles us all, but that gets politics and I'm not doing politics today, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You know another thing we've considered and I throw this out for your opinions as well is to make almost an artificial book and I'll tell you what brought this up. This is the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. But that's a lousy book for turning pages because there are no pictures. And forty selected pages of text would not be very exciting. But if we picked forty significant passages and had things come up from other books illustrating the point things from Huxley or from Lamark or any of those. But the question is do we want Turning the Pages to look like a book, a real book or do we want it to be a synthetic book. And of course of the purist really know it's synthetic anyway. So, but it's an interesting technology and we're going to you know explore it. In fact I was asked this morning if we'd be interested in scanning a book that belonged to another library. Which of course I sure why not because it's fun. So I now turn this over to...[Janet Zipser in background]. Ooh I get to pull the winning ticket. [End]